Touch Kobo lost ALL my books' read/unread status

[jusmee]

Running 2.1.5, my kobo just lost the read/unread status of ALL my books. Now it's so hard to find new books to read I think I will delete all my books and only ever load new ones onto the kobo, deleting them as I finish them, or decide they are no good, in case it does this again.

So annoying for software to be so unreliable.

[Lynx-lynx]

Jusmee I do exactly that now - just download the immediate book/s that I want to read to whatever of my 3 devices (Sony, Playbook and Kobo) that I want to read them on, and then delete them once I've finished reading them.

I use Calibre only now to record any details about the book that I want to keep for posterity or whatever, and have columns for Read (Year) and other columns specific to my needs about the books.

My non-fiction books I can't read on the Glo because the notes feature works entirely haphazardly and once you've got to say Note 33 from the page that you're reading it on, you then can't get back because the software doesn't work properly.

I now have 2 Kobo accounts because I do not download kepubs and I do not sync - I decide which device I'll read on. (I got that 2 Kobo accounts trick from a thread recently) So, one account I buy my Kobo books with, and the other account I don't use for purchasing, so therefore there aren't any books in it - but I have it as the primary device for the Glo so that when there's a software update that's the one that I'll sync with.

Make sense?

[jusmee]

Yes it makes sense. It shouldn't be this difficult though !!

[jackastor]

Originally Posted by jusmee

Yes it makes sense. It shouldn't be this difficult though !!

It isnt. Putting books on and the off is a waste of time. The fact that the Device has the potential to hold 30k worth of books makes it a portable library. I have over 2500 books currently on my Reader, I keep them all on the sd card and have no issues with them at all. There are a number of programs that people use to mange books and sometimes that corrupts the data base. They swear by the programs and although they do a decent job of manageing books people forget that these 3rd party programs are not in any way supported or endorsed by any ebook device manufacture. While I can not comment on what caused the problem in your case, I have many major issues with dif software that communicated with the Kobo that was not supplied by Kobo. I have resolved all those issues by not allowing the 3rd party software to talk to my kobo.

Good luck

Jack

[jusmee]

Originally Posted by jackastor

It isnt. Putting books on and the off is a waste of time. The fact that the Device has the potential to hold 30k worth of books makes it a portable library. I have over 2500 books currently on my Reader, I keep them all on the sd card and have no issues with them at all. There are a number of programs that people use to mange books and sometimes that corrupts the data base. They swear by the programs and although they do a decent job of manageing books people forget that these 3rd party programs are not in any way supported or endorsed by any ebook device manufacture. While I can not comment on what caused the problem in your case, I have many major issues with dif software that communicated with the Kobo that was not supplied by Kobo. I have resolved all those issues by not allowing the 3rd party software to talk to my kobo.

Good luck

Jack

I guess you are referring to Calibre, as that's the software I use. The only other software is ADE and you have no choice in that for books using Adobe DRM. Unfortunately the inept nature of Kobo's native handling of collections of books forces us into using other software. Without a decent way of managing "30k worth of books" there is no point in storing them all on there.

I am talking about how slow and clumsy it is, trying to use Kobo's library list to find an unread book - for example. Maybe I should forget about unread marked books, and just move them onto a shelf called "read books" as I finish them. Unless it totally corrupts the shelves, that might work.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by jusmee

Running 2.1.5, my kobo just lost the read/unread status of ALL my books. Now it's so hard to find new books to read I think I will delete all my books and only ever load new ones onto the kobo, deleting them as I finish them, or decide they are no good, in case it does this again.

So annoying for software to be so unreliable.

I'm curious about what happened just before you lost the reading status. From my experience, this happens only when something goes wrong. Or using the old calibre driver.

The previous calibre driver set the reading status based on values in the tags column if the automatic metadata management was used. The current one doesn't for the Touch, Glo and Mini.

Another time you will lose the reading status is with a factory reset. There is nothing that stores the status for books other than kepubs, so the status can't be restored.

Another way to lose the status is if the database on the device gets corrupted. In that case, the device might rebuild the database after reprocessing the books on the device. The only times this has happened to me was been because I unplugged from the PC without ejecting it. The fix has always been to replace the database from a backup or do a factory reset. Logging off the device and back in again probably would have fixed it as well.

Logging off is another way to cause this. I believe this simply replaces the existing with an empty copy.

From the above, one way to reduce the problem is to take a backup of the database. This in ".kobo\KoboReader.sqlite". Then if it gets corrupted, restore the latest version. Then you only lose the changes since the backup was taken.

[jusmee]

Originally Posted by davidfor

I'm curious about what happened just before you lost the reading status. From my experience, this happens only when something goes wrong. Or using the old calibre driver.

The previous calibre driver set the reading status based on values in the tags column if the automatic metadata management was used. The current one doesn't for the Touch, Glo and Mini.

What/where do I check to see if this is the case? The only I remember doing was to add one new book using Calibre (0.8.51). Does that have the old driver?

Originally Posted by davidfor

Another time you will lose the reading status is with a factory reset. There is nothing that stores the status for books other than kepubs, so the status can't be restored.

Another way to lose the status is if the database on the device gets corrupted. In that case, the device might rebuild the database after reprocessing the books on the device. The only times this has happened to me was been because I unplugged from the PC without ejecting it. The fix has always been to replace the database from a backup or do a factory reset. Logging off the device and back in again probably would have fixed it as well.

Logging off is another way to cause this. I believe this simply replaces the existing with an empty copy.

From the above, one way to reduce the problem is to take a backup of the database. This in ".kobo\KoboReader.sqlite". Then if it gets corrupted, restore the latest version. Then you only lose the changes since the backup was taken.

No resets or crashes of any kind recently. I will look at ways to back up the database. Actually, it would be nice if that was a task Calibre could automate.

[PeterT]

YES to the old driver. Calibre is currently at 0.9.10; 0.8.51 was released 11 May, 2012. As a rule of thumb there is a new release every week!

The updated driver was initially added in 0.9.1, 05 Oct, 2012, and has had more updates since then.

[jusmee]

I have now updated, but I must say I don't understand. There is nothing in the 'tags' column about read/unread status that I can find.

Anyway, so what does the read/unread status synch with now?

[davidfor]

As Peter said, that is the old driver. If, on the "Sending books to device" preference page in calibre, you have "Metadata management" set to automatic, the driver changed the reading status. Firstly, it resets the status to unread. Then it looks at the tags to set the status. If book has "Im_Reading" or "Read" as a tag, the status is set. Personally, I didn't like that, so I never used it. When I rewrote the drive for the 2.0.0 firmware on the Touch, I removed that function.

As to the backup, yes, that would be a good idea in some sort of Kobo Utilities plugin for calibre.

[jusmee]

OK, and thanks for the help.